By Daljit Nagra, published by Faber
Yiewsley, just out with Faber, is the most directly personal of all of Daljit Nagra’s work, presenting a self-conscious retrospective of his oeuvre and a moving exploration of his unlikely journey towards poetry. This literary-autobiographical impulse emerges as explicit intention in “Versed”, towards the end of the volume: “You, who’s no longer masked behind each of your Pantone editions set forth like loose cannons” (75). This obvious play on words evokes Nagra’s counter-canonical irruption into the largely monolingual scene of contemporary British poetry back in the early 2000s. The cover of Yiewsley, unlike Nagra’s previous collections whose cover was a single block of colour, features a multi-chromatic composition of objects that relate to the poet’s childhood and youth in the small town of Yiewsley near Uxbridge. All these objects appear in the poems as symbols of his often conflicted bi-cultural upbringing: a lollipop, a jalebi (a fried Indian sweet whose “mushy crackle of breakneck syrup” sends him directly on an “outbound journey/to the saffron arterial of Amritsar”, his parents’ hometown), a jar of chutney with the word “poetry” on the label.
The collection assumes the format of a tale from memory told in a more or less chronological fashion: “now summon the town where you were born/near the bigger towns, your post-war/ round the clock whistling factory town” (3). The poetic persona is the autobiographical self, with a consistent use of the second-person singular to recall memories, intense, bittersweet, and upsetting, of growing up as the son of working-class Sikh parents in a predominantly white town in the 1960s and 70s. Gone is the shape-shifting and multilingual ventriloquism of his early collections Look We Have Coming to Dover! and Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy Machine, whose inventive, almost giddy code-switching idiom that merged English, Punjabi and myriad other influences became Nagra’s distinctive poetic signature. Yiewsley’s language is practically stripped of hybridity, letting through more profound feelings of unbelonging, racial exclusion, and a culturally split self—“when what you’ve become/isn’t what you were supposed to be” (4). The poems “owl”, and “pola” explain his consistent use of the “you” to tell his own story: it is a way to soothe oneself to sleep “when there’s no one you can turn to” (32). His parents’ total lack of interest in his formal schooling moves him to ask: “who’d give you the talking-to when you were/ the mother and father to the son?” (66). The abyss of their incomprehension of who their son has become comes to a head when, by now an established poet, Nagra visits them and gives them a copy of his books. At the end of the visit, “in Punjabi they said/you can take them back to sell” (81)—their strictly utilitarian view of writing and how it might profit their son is how they express their care for him.
The poems are self-contained episodes that together make a story with recurring characters. His childhood friend Nigel appears at key points; in the midst of all the racist bullying the poet experiences, Nigel is presented (with more than a touch of sentimentality) as loyal and affectionate, explaining idiomatic expressions to the young Daljit, helping him to decode alien British culture. The last poem, “cake”, returns us, madeleine-like, to the poet’s childhood, when Nigel’s mother bakes a birthday cake for ten-year-old Daljit “with piping all about like ocean waves endless/in their ebb and flow/within which your name is swirled” (85). The poet’s memory of this unheard-of exotic luxury ends the collection on a nostalgically positive note, without resolving the deep tensions between Sikh and British cultures that shaped his upbringing.
